Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Yesterday was a perfect example.

Yesterday was a perfect example of how we travel with the motorhome. We like to depart early, travel no more than 200 kms (120 miles) in a day, and be parked up at our overnight spot before 2:00pm.

And that's pretty much exactly what happened.

We like to leave early. Of course "early" means different things to different people, but unless our destination is less than two hours away, we like to be on the road by 9:00am. That way, you have lots of time to stop and see things along the way.

On the road at 8:15am!

One of the reasons we were that early was because we had no internet! Usually, I post the blog first thing in the morning, but with no internet we figured we would simply leave and find a better signal along the way.

A little tight getting through here!

We find that 200 kms (120 miles) is a long enough day. Doing any more than that usually means that you're on a major highway for most of the drive and major highways often mean that you don't see very much along the way. We like to explore along the way!

When we got up to highway 15 that goes north to Mazatlan, we had the choice of taking the expensive toll highway, or staying on the free road. We chose the free road! Sometimes in Mexico there is a major benefit to taking a toll highway, but in this situation, we didn't see the point. Besides, we had been on this section of toll highway on the bus a few years ago, and it's a pretty boring road. Plus, the free road is...well...free!

Young banana trees.

Scenery along the way.

Lots of agriculture in this area.

We stopped several times along the way. Once to check for an internet signal, which again wasn't worthwhile. Once to check out a ruin site, but the road to it wasn't accessible my motorhome! Then, we tried to get into the small city of Acaponeta, but it didn't seem motorhome friendly either and I turned around before we got too far in. Then again for lunch.

Oh, and once because we had to...

A truck had gone off the road up ahead.

They had the tow truck there and we're letting traffic by slowly. We were only held up for 15 minutes or so.

Quite a bit of traffic on this section, and yet other sections were very quiet.

We always plan to be parked up at our next overnight location by 2:00pm at the latest. That way, if anything goes wrong you have lots of daylight hours to fix it. And, because we never make reservations we never know if it might take a few tries to find somewhere worthwhile to camp for the night.

The Sinaloa border, exiting Nayarit.

Yesterday, we started looking for somewhere just after noon. And it was almost 2:00pm when we got to the outskirts of the town of Ecuinapa. Ruth spotted a water park that looked like it had a decent parking area, but the entrance road looked a little difficult to navigate. I carried on, but turned around further up the road and came back to it. Had no problem making our way down the hill to the entrance and pulled in to the empty lot.

I saw a guy working on a tractor, and went over and explained that we were looking for somewhere to park for the night. I said that we didn't need anything but a parking spot and that we would be gone by 9:00am the next morning. He waved me off and said "sure, you can park here...no problem".

And we even have a good internet signal.

Sherman, parked up for the night near Ecuinapa, Sinaloa. GPS 22.83378 -105.76262

So, we left early....we had lots of time to stop along the way...and we were parked up by 2:00pm.

I've been reading your blog over the last few weeks and I just caught up to the present. Thank you for sharing your wonderful adventures and allowing me to live vicariously through your blog. We have four children from elementary school through college, so it will be a while before we can travel:)

Thank you for the kind words Michelle. Hopefully we can give you some ideas for when you do hit the road. There are a number of blogs out there that travel with they children and are able to make it work, so you never know. :-)

Okay, this is a long story... you better make yourself comfortable! Some of our long time readers might remember that I (Kevin) need to ge...

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